Authors: Rhys Burling, Alex Jiang

Everybody always talks about student stress, and most communities try to fix this by changing environments, giving support, therapy, raising awareness through multiple events and more. However, one thing we often overlook is the people who teach these students. Teachers. Teachers are one of the most important people in raising and preparing the next generation to accomplish great things. 

(“State of Education: Teacher Stress and Wellbeing | National Education Union”)

Firstly, teachers in English state schools feel like they are spending too much time outside of school to continue work. By looking at the graph, we can see that a very small percentage of teachers do not need to spend extra time doing their work outside of school hours. While teachers may get a lot of holidays based on this data, most teachers still need to do work during these holidays, and even though school usually ends before 4 pm, 63% often spend their evenings working on work.  This is due to the fact that most schools are understaffed and do not have enough teachers, so each teacher is teaching too many classes.

Mr Jalsevac, a teacher at VSA for six years and with multiple degrees, says that as his job as a teacher, he finds the job stressful as well, meaning that everyone finds going to school stressful. However, Mr Jalsevac is not stressed because of school work but stressed for many other reasons. First, Mr Jalsevac says the planning lessons are very difficult because every student in his classes learns better in a different way, and he spends a lot of time trying to include and make the lessons easy for every student to understand. This is also very difficult because of the large number of classes that he needs to teach. Furthermore, sometimes, there are times when his classes areclass is skipped due to assemblies or unexpected events, meaning that the lesson plan he created to teach all the content before the assessment is not one lesson shorter, which also affects the class. Secondly, Mr Jalsevac finds grading tasks quite stressful because he needs to grade an entire class’s worth of English essays within 2 weeks and meet report card deadlines while still trying to leave the assessment as late as possible for the students. This means that Mr Jalsevac must finish marking the assessments for all the classes he teaches very quickly in order to meet the report card deadline. The second aspect of grading that Mr Jalsevac finds stressful is deciding the student’s grade. This is because he needs to make sure that each student gets a fair grade for the quality of their work. This is stressful because all the students want a good grade and spend a lot of time practising for the assessment, and he wants everyone to be happy with their results, but he cannot give results that aren’t aligned with the quality of work a student produces.

To solve teacher stress, rather than wellbeing posters or mindfulness sessions, we need a fundamental rethink of the workload given. Reducing contact hours, rules of contact during late evenings and weekends, employing more administrative staff in all subject areas, and introducing centralised banks of high-quality lesson resources. All of this will have a greater impact than the currency approaches to the issue. If schools, including VSA, do not recognise this issue as a problem, the retention crisis will continue to worsen.

In conclusion, everybody loves to talk about supporting teachers in this dire situation, but true support means giving back their wasted time. Clocking in during their late evenings, weekends, and their peace of mind. Teachers are the people to lead the next generation; the least we can do is stop punishing them for doing their job. If we truly believe that teachers are one of the most important people in society, then we must treat their time and well-being as non-negotiable and important priorities.